Atlantic City, New Jersey –
Atlantic City’s main casino workers union and New Jersey’s attorney general on Monday asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a different union seeking to ban smoking in the city’s nine casinos.
Local 54 of the Unite Here union said in a filing in state Superior Court that a third of the 10,000 workers it represents would be at risk of losing their jobs and the means to support their families if smoking were banned.
Currently, smoking is allowed on 25 percent of the casino floor. But those areas are not contiguous, and the practical effect is that secondhand smoke is present in varying degrees throughout the casino floor.
A lawsuit filed earlier this month by the United Auto Workers, which represents casino franchisees Bally’s, Caesars and Tropicana, seeks to overturn New Jersey’s indoor smoking law, which bans it in virtually all workplaces except in the casinos.
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, representing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy and the state health department, said the state’s indoor smoking law does not deny any group of people equal protection under the law “and does not “infringes on any purported constitutional right to security,” urging the court to dismiss it.
Nancy Erika Smith, the attorney who filed the lawsuit, reacted with disbelief to Local 54’s request.
“I have never seen a union fight against the health and safety of its members, not once,” he said. “Fortunately, Unite’s economic arguments, although false, have absolutely no relevance to the constitutional issue at hand.”
Donna DeCaprio is president of Local 54, which represents hotel workers, bartenders, baggage handlers, public area cleaners and other workers at the nine casinos.
“We support the health and safety of our members and believe improvements must be made to the current work environment,” he said Monday. “A balance needs to be struck that protects workers’ health and preserves good jobs.”
DeCaprio said a complete smoking ban would be “catastrophic” for Atlantic City, adding that between 50 and 72 percent of all revenue earned by in-person players comes from smoking sections.
The union supports legislation introduced earlier this year that would maintain the current limit of 25 percent of the casino floor that can smoke.
But it would allow smoking in unenclosed areas of the casino that contain slot machines and are designated smoking areas that are more than 15 feet away from table games served by live dealers. It would also allow casinos to offer smoking in separate closed and ventilated rooms with the condition that no worker can be assigned to work in such a room against his will.
The smoking ban is one of the most controversial issues not only in the Atlantic City casinos, but also in other states where workers have expressed concern about secondhand smoke. They are running similar campaigns in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Virginia.
“A complete smoking ban would put thousands of jobs at risk, jeopardizing the wages, health and welfare benefits, and retirement benefits of Local 54 members and their families,” the union wrote in its court filing.
He noted that in 2008, when the Atlantic City City Council imposed a short-lived total smoking ban, casino revenue fell 19.8 percent in the first week, leading to the enactment of the current smoking zone. 25 percent smoking on casino floors.
These workers, including many board game merchants, say quitting smoking would actually attract enough customers to more than offset the loss of smokers going elsewhere.
Nicole Vitola, a Borgata merchant and one of the leaders of the fight against smoking, accused Local 54 of being the same manager of the casino.
“Instead of fighting for the health and safety of workers, Local 54 is fighting in court to allow casinos to continue poisoning their members with toxic secondhand smoke,” he said.